The evolutionary elimination of "Homo Managerous"!

Are you a manager or an aspiring manager at a medium-to-large technology corporation? Or a “manager of managers”?

Here is the dark truth that no one is telling you: The role of the manager as we know it, is going extinct - we are at the beginning of the end.

There is slow but sure seismic shift underway to remove “layering” and “overheads”. What started at Meta as the “Year of Efficiency” is likely to expand to other companies and become the new normal in the post-ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era Silicon Valley.

As it stands today, the “skills” and “activities” a manager needs to learn, perform, get ahead and grow in their career revolves around:

🔂 Daily Stand-ups, Weekly 1-on-1/Skip-level meetings, Weekly TPS Report, etc.
🗓️ Monthly Operations/Headcount Review
☸️ Quarterly Finance/Business/Technology/OKR Review
📆 Annual OKR/Budget/Compensation Planning
📅 5 Year Strategy/Roadmap
🤷🏾‍♂️ Performance Review, Performance Rating, Calibration, Stack Ranking, etc.

Wait, how can you say that 1-on-1s are not necessary? Isn’t it a “best practice”?

Well, it is not just me, but listen to Jenson Huang, the CEO of NVidia. He discourages it even today! He doesn’t do any 1-on-1s and has 60 direct reports… Imagine how much “layering” gets removed in such a setup. Listen to him explain this:

After 23 years of experience in Tech in various levels of management, I’m here to not only warn you that the clock is ticking but also help you to survive and thrive this massive shift in paradigm.

In this post, I will try to explain what’s happening and also give you some actionable guidance and next steps along with the two big opportunities in front of you in the years ahead.

If I were a betting man, I’d say that aspiring managers have a better shot at this than current managers. The primary reason is that this involves unlearning, which is hard for many for us. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it:

Table of Contents

• What is happening and why?

  • Do we know what these words mean?

  • The smoke before the fire!

  • The elephant in the room

• So, what do I do now?

  • What to know/learn instead?

  • How to put this to practice?

  • What are my two big opportunities ?

• Onwards…

What is happening and why?

The promise of technology was to improve our productivity and give us more free time. However, the irony is that technology companies are struggling to solve their productivity problems and end up working long hours - poor work-life balance, burnout, quiet quitting, rest-and-vest, etc.

The obsession about improving productivity and innovation is a long story - from Waterfall, Agile, SAFe, LeSS, Scrum, “Spotify” Model, etc. But, the internal chaos, pain and the inability to get stuff done won’t be found in press releases externally but is known to every CXO deep down in their heart.

There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of modern knowledge work and the organization of it. The mistakes and category errors of mainstream management practices are wide and deep.

👫 Fundamental misunderstanding of human nature: Theory X vs Theory Y
🥷 Command-and-Control vs Decentralization
🌀 Seeking Certainty vs Embracing Complexity
🚫 Purely Reductionistic vs Systemic Thinking
✅ Blind Chasing of Efficiency vs Effectiveness
🗒️ Too much focus on Planning vs Preparation
🥅 Management by Objectives vs Management by Means
📈 Chasing Growth vs Development
🔢 Quantification Bias
and more

We are truly in a “Emperor has no clothes!” moment. Lemme explain…

Do we know what these words mean?

The first principle that underpins DevOps is Systems Thinking.

How many of your past or current managers & executives can you learn about “Systems Thinking” and how it is being applied in your organization?